The present invention relates to a plastic card provided with a magnetic stripe and particularly to a plastic card provided with a magnetic stripe, comprising a magnetic recording layer having a structure of two layers different from each other in magnetic properties and a reflection hologram.
As opposed to other cards, such as prepaid cards, in plastic cards provided with a magnetic stripe, which are delivered to users after intensive issuing (encoding) at a particular place, the stored data are not rewritten after issuance and only reading is effected. Conventional plastic cards provided with a magnetic stripe for such applications have such a construction that a magnetic stripe is provided on one side or double sides of the cards and information is written on the magnetic stripe at a high recording density so that the recorded information cannot be easily read out from the outside.
However, due to inherent properties of the magnetic stripe, the recorded information can be freely rewritten and erased, so that it is easy to forge or alter the data of the card. In this recent years, this has been brought to the fore as a large social problem. In particular, at the present time, since the magnetic stripe is easily available, it is easy to prepare a similar card. Further, when the magnetic stripe is exposed on the surface of the cards as in the conventional cards, there occurs a problem that the magnetic record information can be easily transferred to another magnetic stripe by magnetic transfer techniques.
For this reason, various means have been developed for preventing the forgery or alteration of the information recorded on the magnetic stripe. However, simple and effective means for preventing the forgery and alteration of the information recorded on the magnetic stripe has not been developed yet.
Under these circumstances, the present invention has been made, and an object of the present invention is to provide a plastic card provided with a magnetic stripe that is very difficult to forge and alter and, even when subjected to forgery or alteration, enables the forgery or alteration to be easily detected in appearance.